Experimental Philosophy Trilogy

Created in a deadpan presentational style reminiscent of Coonley's faux-instructional Pony videos, the Experimental Philosophy Trilogy fuses a farrago of materials appropriated from stock media archives, chroma-key mischief, and simulated audience polls to illustrate recent findings from the burgeoning field of experimental philosophy, or "x-phi." This controversial young discipline, which takes a burning armchair as its emblem, supplants traditional ways of conducting philosophy with empirical research methods borrowed from psychology and the social sciences.

Narrated by non-philosophers for a non-expert audience, the three videos in this collection introduce seminal x-phi studies on the subjects of intentional behavior (The Side-Effect Effect), the asynchronous way in which people interpret others' happiness and unhappiness (Happinessness), and folk understandings of moral relativity (Absolute Folk). The videos have been used to spark vigorous online arguments and real-life conversations about the way philosophical values play into our understanding of everyday experience (and vice versa).

Included Titles

An ordinary living room with a green screen, TV, and domestic cat serves as the backdrop for this DIY introduction to experimental philosophy. The president of a company is considering a vice president's moneymaking scheme. He says, "Look, I know...

Is Miley more or less happy than June Cleaver? Given very fragmentary information about the lives of two stereotypical figures with identical emotional states, people tend to give strangely asymmetrical evaluations of the two characters' propensity...

An intrepid academic travels the world, asking people if it is OK for someone to stab a friend in order to test the sharpness of a knife. If one person says it's OK and another says it's not OK, can both respondents be right? This video is an...